In the same St. Louis, more than 8 inches of rain had fallen from midnight to 7 a.m. CT — already surpassing the city’s all-time one-day record of 6.85 inches set on Aug. 20, 1915. say the National Meteorological Service. More rain was forecast, although it was expected to taper off by late morning and end by mid-afternoon, the National Weather Service office in St. Louis.
In the wider area of St. Louis, about 6 to 10 inches of rain fell from midnight to 6 a.m., according to the weather service.
Floodwater surrounded vehicles on streets in the St. Louis and crawled into apartments and other buildings, videos showed on social media.
A lifeguard from St. Louis, kneeling on top of the roof of a flooded car, handed a child to other rescuers in a boat, video shot by Victorria Adams from an apartment balcony showed. “My neighbors woke me up to tell me what was going on. Then I went out into this whole thing,” Adams told CNN of the waters that turned the street outside his apartment into a virtual river.
In the Ellendale neighborhood of St. Louis, firefighters checked about 18 flooded homes and rescued six people and six dogs by boat, the city’s fire department said early Tuesday. The water entered the house of St. Louis by Andrew Schafer “like a waterfall,” he told CNN affiliate KMOV.
“I took out my three dogs, three kids and my wife,” Schafer told KMOV.
Emergency calls in St. Louis were arriving “for several people trapped” in floodwaters, the county’s office of emergency management said.
“We urge everyone to avoid travel!” the office posted on Twitter, adding that the central parts of the county were the most affected.
Portions of the MetroLink rail system in the St. Louis were flooded, and would-be motorists should plan for delays of two hours or more, the supplier said.
MetroLink’s outdoor Forest Park-DeBaliviere station, north of the city zoo, was under water, footage from resident Tony Nipert showed. He noticed the flooding while walking his dogs, he told CNN.
“It’s currently a river,” he tweeted about the station Tuesday morning. “I’ve never seen this in the 4 years I’ve been here.”
Floodwaters were also accumulating on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, including the East St. Louis, where parts of interstate highways or their ramps were temporarily closed, the weather service said.
The flooded stretch of I-70 and parts of other interstates were also closed
Vehicles were reported to be submerged or stuck in flooded streets in various parts of the St. Louis, the weather service said shortly after 6:30 a.m. The four interstates that head into downtown St. Louis: I-70, I-64, I-55 and I-44 had at least one closure due to flooding early Tuesday, KMOV reported. Motorists were especially urged to avoid I-70 in the area of St. Louis, the State Highway Patrol said.
A stretch of I-70 was closed in both directions before sunrise in St. Peters, about a 30-mile drive northwest of St. Louis.
Jerome Smith was stuck on that part of I-70 for three hours while workers tried to clear the drains, he told CNN. The highway was covered by water, which was held by barriers on both sides, the video he recorded from his vehicle shows.
“You can see there’s cars up there floating… It’s just all boxed up, there’s nowhere for the water to go,” Smith says in the video.
The heavy rains in the area of St. Louis occur only once every 500 years, on average, according to weather service data.
But the climate crisis is pushing these extremes to become more frequent and is supercharging rainfall around the world. The atmosphere may hold more moisture as temperatures rise, making significant record breaking even more likely. More water vapor in the atmosphere means more moisture available to fall as rain, leading to higher rainfall rates. Human-caused fossil fuel emissions have warmed the planet by a little more than 1 degree Celsius, on average, with more intense warming in land areas. . Scientists are increasingly confident of the role of the climate crisis in extreme weather and have warned that these events will become more intense and dangerous with every fraction of a degree of warming.
CNN’s Judson Jones, Dave Hennen, Angela Fritz and Raja Razek contributed to this report.